Now that Obama put away his red crayon, and the msm has gone on to their next big story du jour, it would perhaps be easy to forget other issues from months past. One of those issues? Syria and their chemical weapons.
From Homeland Security News Wire:
Assad retains secret caches of chemical weapons: Israeli intelligence
1 October 2014
Despite committing to dismantle and give up its chemical weapons – Syria was in possession of the world’s largest chemical weapons stock — President Bashar al-Assad’s regime still maintains a “residual” chemical weapons capacity, consisting of a few tons of the proscribed materials.
Israel’s intelligence community has concluded that the Assad regime has decided to keep this reduced, but still formidable, chemical weapons capability, and has successfully concealed it from the inspectors of the UNchemical weapons watchdog who, a few weeks ago, have declared the chemical disarmament of Syria to be officially complete.
The process of destroying and removing Syria’s chemical weapons began almost a year ago, following international pressure on the Assad regime in the wake of the August 2013 sarin gas attack by Assad forces on a Damascus suburb, an attack which left more than 1,400 dead.
The August 2013 attack was the latest in a series of smaller chemical weapons attacks by Assad’s army on civilians in rebel-held areas, attacks which began in December 2012. Haaretz notes that these early incidents were more or less ignored, and certainly not taken seriously, by the United States and other Western countries. The Israeli intelligence community provided the United States with evidence for a few of these early instances of chemical weapons use – and the head of Israel’s military intelligence referred to these attack in one or two public presentations – but the Obama administration dismissed those claims. President Obama had publicly drawn a “red line” with regard to the use of chemical weapons by Assad, and the administration saw the earlier use of chemical weapons by Assad as too small and localized to trigger a U.S. military retaliation which the president’s red line references promised....
Heck of a job there, Mr President.
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